today that. many of the people marching down to occupy that building had no idea where they were going because the leadership of the occupy oakland group had decided to keep it a secret so the police wouldn't find out where they were going is there no leadership and are they keeping things secret from the rest of the membership isn't this the exact contradiction of you know horizontal management and decision making . that decision to keep the location quiet was strange to me because i and many other members of the press and many just bystanders to occupy it had a pretty good idea that kaiser i actually am west where occupy oakland was done said i'm an occupying and so i don't think that it was too difficult for the police to figure that out i know that the committee to that was in charge of coming up with the logistics of the operation was about eighty to one hundred people strong i'm not sure how many of those people were aware of exactly what building they were

planning to take but i know that it was a small contingent meant to keep the operation quiet and and not let least find out that so many details were leaked that i think that that was just an impossible goal yeah ok eric at least one man was tasered last night occupy d.c. here there have been many complaints about police using excessive force when dealing with occupy protesters and journalists covering the protests over the past few months and your opinion of those actions warrant it. in d.c. it has been relatively peaceful there is that there is a truce between the occupiers and the police the occupiers they do their actions they shout the slogans against the ninety nine percent they talk about the people versus the powerful. yes thank you against the one percent let's get this exactly right the point one percent the tippy top people versus the powerful they do actions in front of banks actions in front of a lobbyist keeping the message out there in many cases coming dangerously close to

disrupting traffic or something else that's inconvenient and the police have generally been tolerating it and generally tolerating the tent cities and macpherson square and freedom plaza and what the police the park police did very recently under congressional pressure was say well we've had this careful balance between the vandalism and the first amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances and we are now coming down on the side of treating all like criminals and vandals instead of first amendment that titian for grievances and so starting at noon today we will enforce the ban against sleep think which is not a big deal it noon in one and two o'clock i will be to get back to the camp tonight and see what's going so beyond your sleep over your. right when you can. what do you plan doing tonight what are you expecting to happen. so i don't know if people were able to see today but we've built a giant tent of dreams over general macpherson who is the statue in the middle of

a part of. yes so basically that represents a lot of the reasons why most of our buyers got out there in the first place that a dream for a better america a better world really in all so many ways and i think a lot of us are planning on staying in that tent of dreams this evening hopefully that the police decide not to use any force or just generally just keep the peace because i know that we're going to remain. as going to be in. just want to watch suzy there's been a virtual media blackout on this it's astounds me how little of the national corporate media has covered for example even what happened in oakland over the weekend and to the extent that they have they've focused on the actions of a small group of people who went to city hall and basically trash part of city hall and burn a flag that's what's got everybody hysterical you know all the right wing talk show hosts going off on it all day long were those folks. representative of occupy

oakland you talked about you know the. secret committee or private committee within the leadership of occupy oakland deciding on the building was there also a secret or or a private decision made to to trash city hall or was that a completely separate group and what do you think about this the and the the idea that that apparently these people have that in order to break through the media blackout they got to do something outrageous. my understanding is that what happened at city hall was an entirely as honest sort of action that i was not there i was detained at the time but my understanding is that that was entirely at a time it was kind of i'm sorry of the moment when i have been told by several occupiers is that the jurors to city hall were actually left and that they had not been. city hall i guess is saying that people right the doors open with

a crowbar i'm and i haven't seen any evidence of that are heard other reports that that i haven't so i think that it was more a spur of the moment on and shortly it's you know ten fifteen minutes in the building sort of sort of that thing i don't think that they planned that out right in terms of five doing something. big to get attention i think that that's definitely where where occupy oakland is coming from but i think the definition of. big action could mean the nonviolent. shutting down of the port just as much as it could mean as a street battle in front of the art museum. the. gene kwan of oakland has called on other occupy movements around the country to disavow occupy oakland because of the trashing of city hall thoughts from either you guys on this or on the other the other goes well i have one really important thought which is that nobody speaks for

the entire occupy movement and i certainly don't speak for the occupy movement a middle class guy with a job who goes out and supports them as i can on my evenings and weekends and i think what's going to happen with some with the with the with the demand like that is the occupies all over the country will be meeting convening general assembling discussing and figuring out what they want to do it has been we had a solidarity march this sunday in d.c. and in several cities around the nation in new york and philly and boston and several others to go we're all in this together and we were united against the police. the thank you all very much for being with us thank you. who knows what will happen in the nation's capital and i but as we've seen in the past over and over again excessive police force against the occupy movement has only made it stronger so stay tuned. just.

it's the good the bad and the very oxy oxy i have faces silly ugly. good president obama president obama's re-election campaign is a refund in the campaign donations of five registered federal lobbyist made contributions to the campaign between april and september of last year research conducted by the center for responsive politics show that the obama campaign except the twenty two hundred fifty bucks from five lobbyists as well as forty five hundred dollars from three individuals who became federal lobbyist after donating to their campaign. campaign has pledged to refuse contributions of lobbyists ever since the two thousand a campaign its policy by the obama campaign is meant to curb the influences of high powered lobbyist who see money as a means of control over the campaign it's refreshing to see a political figure trying to weed out the influences of lobbyist politics however the same can be said for the likes of mitt romney who has already accepted over

a quarter million dollars from registered federal law since the bad r. and c. chairman reince priebus compared president obama to captain tell me this tino the captain of the run aground italian cruise ship will abandon the ship before all the passengers safely gotten off here's a previous had to say in an interview on face the nation sunday morning in response to a question on the ugly g.o.p. primary season. and in a few months this is all going to be history and we're going to talk about our own little captain scott tino which is president obama who's abandoning the ship here in the united states is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president nearly seventeen people died on that cruise ship accident as a result of. conduct by the captain mr priebus is a little confused after all president obama is consistently presenting legislation in congress and trying to do his job as president only have

a shot down held hostage by the republican party priebus and the republicans are the only ones abandoning ship on the american people and the very very ugly north carolina republican state representative larry pittman pippen has some radical ideas on how to better and force the death penalty and who should face it and in an e-mail to the north carolina general assembly said that we need to make that out penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out every appeal that can be made should have to be made a one time not a serial matter to murderers and i would include abortionists rapists and kidnappers as well are actually executed it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them for my money we should go back to probably hang the outcry for abortionists to face public anger is nothing new but with legislation being introduced in multiple states over the past few years there was centrally legalized the murder of abortion providers by protecting those who kill not to mention bill o'reilly's obsession with dr george tiller who he referred to as tiller the baby killer that culminated with a madman eventually shooting tiller dead in church state representative larry pittman should watch his words he tragically he too may have

a lot on his hands one day and that's very very. after the break the california legislature voted friday on a single payer health care bill to the vote passed or was health care reform dealt another crippling blow. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here in the us. i think. even want to well. whenever the government says they're for keep you safe get ready because you get

your freedom. who will or are all who. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

welcome back to the big picture i'm tom marvin coming up in this half hour california votes on proposed single payer health care legislation the bill passed there were some unexpected hurdles also freddie mac. is betting against you see how the mortgage company is hoping for and gambling on your demise and what do struggling european nation and american state have in common more than you may think i'll tell you all about it that's built.

in the best of the rest of the news california came just a few votes shy of establishing a single payer universal health care system in that state despite receiving a majority of the. what's the state senate senate bill eight ten known as a single payer health care act for california health care for california act was two votes shy of the necessary twenty one votes needed to pass it out of the upper chamber and it's not because senators were opposed to the measure but instead because for moderate democrats decided not to vote at all states senators alex podia one vargas michael rubio and rod wright all abstained from voting on the critical legislation but all four of these guys will have another chance on tuesday when democrats in the state senate plan to bring the legislation up again for a vote so what are the chances now that california could lead the way and establish

a single payer health care system in the nation's most populous state joining me now is the sponsor of this legislation california state senator mark leno representing california's district three senators welcome. thank you john going to be with you great to have you with us first of all about your legislation this legislation passed twice before but each time was vetoed by republican governor schwarzenegger or maybe is made out of it but anyhow it is it harder now to get single payer passed than it was then and if so why. we have gotten our below the single payer universal health care reform bill to a governor's desk twice no other state legislature has done that but we've actually gotten it off the senate floor three times the third time it was held in the assembly so we're back again and you are right a majority of democrats voted for it the other day but we need a majority of the house and that would take twenty one votes as stated and we only

have nineteen votes of the four democratic legislators you showed on the screen three of them have already voted third in the past as well and of course on fortunately none of my republican colleagues have ever voted for the bill and for those who are less familiar with the term single payer it really is medicare for all it's a public private partnership publicly funded privately provided privately and competitively provided health care so your doctor doesn't change your hospital your clinic do not change what changes is who pays for it and you ask why is it more difficult now having already succeeded three times in the senate and unfortunately it's just a fact of life that our senate has though a strong democratic majority in fact we're just shy of a two thirds majority of democrats in the senate it has become a slightly more moderate body could it be that in the past when democrats were voting to make this happen the stakes were in so high because they knew they had

a governor who was going to veto it and now the this could actually happen there's a very high probability jerry brown would sign this legislation. the lobbyists are out in force the box of gotten higher the stakes are higher you know that kind of thing is going on i think you may have put your finger on one of the reasons why yes arnold schwarzenegger was always going to veto the bill so if one had an interest in not roughly in the feathers of the insurance industry. possibility is to vote for it with the wink of the eye that it's not going anywhere anyway jerry brown our new governor when he was running for president of the united states against bill clinton in a democratic primary in one thousand nine hundred two did campaign in support of single payer health care reform for the entire nation so governor brown is well aware of what single payer is all about the importance of removing

a for profit middleman that makes billions of dollars based on a business model that makes these huge profits by denying us health care after we prayed paid for our premiums so he gets it i know he would like to see should we get it too or closer to his desk exactly how the numbers play out of course we can show him that not only will this not cost california i think it will save us billions of dollars as chair of the senate budget committee i've come to learn that a full third of our general fund spending is directly or indirectly related to health care costs and with health care costs and premiums going up five times faster than inflation which is the base from which we get our revenue it is an unsustainable equation california will have a chronic budget deficit until we contain health care costs and this will do it senator leno in about a half minute or so we have left yes i think it's fairly obvious that our

california viewers particularly if they live in one of those four senators districts should be calling them is there anything else that our other viewers around the country should or could be around the world for that matter should or could be doing to help this thing happen tomorrow but appreciate all of your efforts yes anyone who could call the senators who names were on the screen that would always be appreciate we're going to be taking this up tomorrow morning so it's a little short fuse right now but of course if anyone has a way to call the senator's offices it. thank you very much we and in fact we have their names on the screen right now senator mark leno thank you so much for being with us. this is to quote joe biden a b.f.d. call the offices of those four democratic senators who didn't vote and tell about yes on making health care human right in california you know it started with just one province statue on adopting a single health care system or a payer system in cali in canada for the whole country adopted single payer same

thing could happen in the united states of california that's the way. moving on to the ongoing struggle american homeowners are experiencing according to a new investigation by n.p.r. and pro publica mortgage giant freddie mac. was betting billions of dollars that struggling homeowners would foreclose in two thousand and ten and two thousand and eleven a time in which freddie mac. should have been helping those same struggling homeowners refinance their mortgages despite touting on its website that its mission is to quote stabilize the nation's residential mortgage market and expand opportunities for homeownership this investigation shows freddie mac. was doing just the opposite he stabilizing the housing market making profits when people were being kicked out of their homes so how did a public service go so wrong for more on this richer asco joins me in the studio is a senior fellow at the campaign for america's future richard welcome back good to be here it's great to have you with us. what exactly is freddie mac. right now is this all goes back to a fully public institution it was created one hundred thirty eight running up

privatized in sixty eight by learning johnson because he wanted to get basically any cause that might make the vietnam war look bad off the books exactly and so where what is it now well god only knows because what if you're a couple of key lessons out of this great story that was just done by pro publica and then p.r. the regulator responsible for freddie says that well here's what happened basically freddie mac. put in more than three billion dollars while it was being owned by the u.s. taxpayer and rescued by the u.s. taxpayer to the tune of more than one hundred forty billion dollars it bought three point four billion dollars in financial instruments that were essentially betting against the very same struggling homeowners who can't refinance and are stuck with high interest rates it's betting again freddie mac. customers it's betting against its own customers at the same time that it's making

it very difficult for their customers to refinance and when challenged on it. the man responsible said well the two functions are walled off so you have to ask yourself what's walled off from why they are you're supposed to do is finance homeowners not bet money well you know where they actually betting as in like you know shorting the market kind of betting or was this more like. you know when you buy a home you get mortgage insurance so so if you do or title insurance rose so if you discover that you know the titles not any good somebody's going to pay off and you don't get screwed i mean could it have just been that freddie was saying you know if some of these things blow up we want to have somebody covering our back side an insurance company it really doesn't look like that because what they did when they went out and spent this money was they basically bad people who are paying six point five or seven percent interest on their homes we're going to continue to have to do that and so if those people are able to refinance which is what's supposed to be friday's job and which they haven't been doing and they've been getting

a lot of heat for that for years if those people were able to refinance at a much lower rate freddie mac. the organization responsible would lose a great deal of money so it's put itself in a position to bet against the very social function it's supposed to provide and it has done this one well you know it has there's a man who works there named peter federico who makes two point five million dollars a year of taxpayer money to handle the investments for freddie mac. and who refused to comment to the price about this which means he refused to comment to his bosses the taxpayers but he he gets a bonus on top of the two point five million based on how much money he can make so he's betting against the customers of freddie mac. this is make as much money as possible and get as big a bonus as possible as this thing is being run like a like you know one of mitt romney's. private equity funds i mean you know basically it's you know how much can we wring out of it isn't the original sin in

sixty eight when lyndon johnson privatized a public agency and shouldn't we just say ok that's it we're going to take. the whole thing turned into a public agency fire all the millionaire use you know and big salary people let it be run by guys you know making seventy thousand bucks and wearing green eyeshades and just doing the numbers and turn it back into what it used to be oh there's no question that this is the case study in the horrors of privatizing what should be a social function done by the government and it's absolutely horrifying account worse over the years as they got more money as a private sector but they were never fully private sector they were a g.s. c. government sponsored enterprise they leverage the government's backing of them to make more and more money for themselves they hired lobbyists and they corrupted the very process that created them sallie mae the company that handles student loans bought two jets and spent two hundred fifty thousand dollars on bush's inauguration i mean this home potato has been privatized so they are semi privatized socialized

because it was very exact right they they had the profit motive running them but they had the government backstop in them and that's like that's like the worst thing you can imagine it's like saying every any country well it's what the banks got right exactly just. so so the simple answer basically is we need to either what end these agents but there's a need for these agencies and there is for somebody to backstop if mortgages and i certainly think there is and one of the scary things is that there was a democratic proposal to just turn it back over to wall street banks and let them do that and that came out of the center for american progress so what we really need to do is bring this agency back to what it was for thirty years after franklin delano roosevelt which is a very successful agency that managed responsibly who got a mortgage and who didn't and they sure as well richard thank you so much appreciate it this is a consequence of a public institution a government agency is freddie mac. was intended to be intended to be being hijacked by bankers on wall street who want to replace the public good with the profit motive and now five million homeowners

on the verge of foreclosure later are wondering who exactly is on their site. coming up after the break everyone knows the world is any less you're right it's twenty's twelve after all will find out if there's any truth to the popular mayan method tonight's everything you know is wrong. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think rock bottom feeding on the well. whenever the government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you

get your freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear see some other part of it and realized everything you saw you don't i'm sorry is a big issue. crazy

alert distracting demonstrators in davos all many occupy movement protesters showed up in davos for this warriors' world economic forum it was three ukrainian protesters who really stole the show in the snow blanketed freezing cold town the three women went to make a statement on saturday one girl's body read crisis made in davos another is read gangsters party in davos three women are part of the feminine protest group which has become well known in the ukraine over the past few years by using the site of half naked bodies to protest issues ranging from political oppression to animal

rights in an interview one of the women told reporters we came here to switzerland to davos to explain the position of all poor people of the world to explain that we are poor because of these rich people who are now sitting in the building the women like many of the occupy protesters were arrested released after a few hours in other news when asked about the scene in davos new gingrich replied i think it's time for me to go on a fact finding trip without police to. so sometimes you know what you know and sometimes you know what you don't know and sometimes as the firesign theater says everything you know is wrong and you know you think you know what you really are you're right. to make. sure that. you know when you go it is. today is january thirtieth two thousand and twelve which means there are three hundred twenty six days until the end of the world as we know it or at least that's what those who believe in the mayan supposed prediction of the end of the world want you to think from hollywood to conspiracy theory blogs everyone has glorified the mayan so-called prediction that the end of the world will occur on

the winter solstice december twenty first of this year if you really think the world's going to end of december twenty first then everything you know is wrong joining me now to discuss the mayans and help a separate fact from fiction is dr william satoru know a leading mayan scholar and assistant professor in the archaeology department of boston university actress eternal welcome thanks for having me and thanks for joining us from guatemala why is there this belief that the mayans predicted the end of the world. well. a calendar that essentially keeps track of the number of days since the so-called beginning of time really since they started counting and they've generally kept track of only about five digits of that calendar that that long kept now those five digits will all turn to zero in december twenty first.